Characters

Moving on from the Logo design I decided to re-address the characters, looking primarily at the Carrot Character. So I started by sketching out some possible characters. There are a few various styles and some are more pleasing to look at than others. Whereas some are more suitable than others.

From here I moved onto iterating the various parts that would make up the face of the carrot. Breaking down the Eyes, Mouths and Noses, and creating multiple variants until the final design emerged its weary head.

This now gives me enough information to begin the basic final design of the Carrot character, but I still need to give him a personality before moving onto the final render. Watch this space!

So, it’s been a couple of days since my previous post (that’s the problem with having a job, kids and GAMES, GAMES and more GAMES to play) but here we are.

Anyway, as you know I have been looking at vegetables and have finally come up with a list of possible veg to use as characters. It did slightly adapt from the list in the previous post but is not a million miles off, this list was then given to a group of people who had to select seven of them to be developed into game characters. The Below PDF shows the complete list and the final 7 characters.

So… one of the fundamental mistakes I made during the initial design of the game (more specifically the characters) was an assumption on the classification of my Vegetables. Initially I had designed characters based from… a Potato, a Carrot, a radish, an Onion, Broccoli, a Pea and a Pumpkin. There are some mistakes in there as some of them are not VEG!

Original Zombie Pea Design

Original Zombie Potato Design

Original Zombie Pumpkin Design

Original Zombie Onion Design

So I need to look into my food a little further if I plan to make this accurate. One of the main reasons for this (aside from the game title being Vegetrouble) is that this will allow me to expand the initial idea into other food groups for sequels. Anyway enough of that old stuff for now.

Now onto the important part, the research. Of course, there are a lot of things we eat that we may think of as Veg but let me tell you… tomatoes, Cucumbers, Pumpkins, Sweet Peppers and many more are not actually Veg. I always believed in the classification based on a simple couple of rules, if it grows above ground and carries its own seeds, it’s a Fruit. If it grows in the earth it is a Veg. This is still a good method to use as it is fairly accurate. However, following these rules, where would you put things like Broccoli, rhubarb, Lettuce or Peas for example? This is what prompted me to begin researching vegetables (oh the excitement is just bursting out) so I could just find out what was appropriate to use and what wasn’t.

So, after some reading up and generally researching around the exciting world of Fruit ‘n’ Veg, from a botanical stand point you can define a vegetable as all other parts of a plant that are not the seed areas. This includes the leaves (like you find on a cabbage, sprout, or lettuce), the stems (such as rhubarb or celery), the roots (like carrots, spuds or radish) and even the flower buds (cauliflower, broccoli).

All this research has lead me to the following list of potential characters for the game.